Joe Perrotta

Most job seekers already have a pretty long prayer list: get past the filter, hear back from someone, survive round five, and please, finally, get the offer.

Almost nobody adds the one that decides whether the job is actually any good.

A great company with a bad manager is just a bad job with a nice logo.

Your manager decides which projects you get, whether your wins get noticed, and how your worst week gets handled.

They’re the reason people stay three years at companies they don’t even love, and the reason people quit companies everyone else would kill to work at.

The problem is that a long search trains you to stop asking questions. After months of silence, any yes feels like a miracle, and nobody wants to interrogate a miracle.

But the interviews are the one window you get.

Pay attention to how your future manager talks about the people already on their team. If every story is about what someone did wrong, believe them.

The easiest way to be picky is to not be desperate.

When one offer isn’t your only offer, you can actually walk away from the wrong manager instead of talking yourself into it.

So yes, keep praying for the job. Just save a little extra for the person you’ll be reporting to.

Repost if you agree.

P.S. If you are looking for a new job, but don't want to apply for interviews manually and maintain a spreadsheet of where you applied, sign up for SimpleApply.ai for free, and start landing the right interviews.

Landing a job in 2026 isn't one hard thing. It's a long chain of hard things, and the first one is the most boring.

Think about what a typical search actually looks like.

Weeks of evenings spent finding roles, uploading the same resume, and retyping the same work history into portal after portal.

Then, if you're lucky, the interviews start.

A recruiter screen, a hiring manager call, a technical round, a panel, a culture conversation.

At companies like Netflix, candidates regularly report six rounds or more, and a single process can stretch on for weeks or even months.

That's what this image gets right.

You jump first, and you build the plane on the way down.

Every stage after the application actually needs you. Interviews need preparation, panels need stories you've practiced, and final rounds need you rested and sharp.

The application is the only stage where the work is mostly repetition, and it's the one that eats the most hours.

We're not pretending to fix the whole journey with SimpleApply.ai.

We're fixing the first and most boring part of it. You upload your resume once, it pulls fresh roles from company career pages, and it only applies where you're a strong match.

That takes the manual applying off your plate, so the hours you'd have spent on forms go into the stages where you actually make the difference.

The rest of the plane is still yours to build. You'll just have a lot more time to build it.
If you're job searching right now, sign up for SimpleApply.ai for free and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I'll show you how it works.

P.S. I'm working with a select group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you want in.

The job search is the only relationship where one side does all the work, and the other side is allowed to just disappear.

That’s why a post like this one hits a nerve with so many people.

You research the company, prep your stories, clear your calendar, and show up sharp, and then the conversation just stops without a rejection or even an update.

To be fair, ghosting usually comes from a broken process more than a bad person.

Recruiters are often juggling far more candidates than anyone could follow up with properly. But that doesn’t change who absorbs the cost.

The candidate does. Ghosting doesn’t just waste the hours you put in. It keeps you hoping, which means you hold back on other opportunities while you wait for an answer that’s never coming.

You can’t make a company reply. What you can control is how much of yourself is riding on any single process, and how much of your week goes into the part before an interview even exists.

If you don’t want to spend those hours on manual applications, you can upload your resume to SimpleApply.ai once, and it pulls fresh roles from company career pages and applies only where you’re a strong match.

So when one company goes silent, you haven’t sunk your whole week into it, and other conversations are already in motion.

Ghosting will probably never fully go away. It just shouldn’t get to cost you this much.
If you’re job searching right now, sign up for SimpleApply.ai for free and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I’ll show you how it works.

P.S. I’m working with a select group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you want in.

A recruiter shared on Reddit that out of 4,596 applications, they could only find 132 people who passed a real qualification screen.

And one of the biggest red flags in the rest is resumes that read like the job post.
Here's what I think is happening right now.

Someone finds a role, pastes the job description into ChatGPT, and asks it to "tailor" their resume.

The AI does exactly what it's told. It pulls the same keywords, the same phrases, and sometimes even renames their last job title to match the one they're applying for.

Now picture 500 people doing that for the same role.
Every summary mirrors the posting.
Every bullet hits the same keywords.

The recruiter has no way to tell who actually did the work and who borrowed the words.

So they start treating all of it as noise. That's how a real candidate ends up in the same pile as the bots.

Honestly, I'd rather you apply to fewer jobs than send a company a copy of its own job description.

Your resume is supposed to show what you did. If it only shows what they asked for, it's just a mirror.

What I'd do instead:
→ Keep your real job titles. If you were an "Analyst" doing PM work, show that in the bullets, not the title line.

→ Use the job description to decide where to apply, not to rewrite who you are.

→ If you have to change more than a few lines to fit a role, it probably isn't your role.

→ Lead with numbers and details only you could write. That's the part AI can't copy from the posting.

→ Skip the weak matches. Applying anyway just puts you with the 4,122 who were "clearly not a fit."

This is a big reason we built match scoring into SimpleApply.ai.

Instead of bending your resume toward every posting, we score how well your actual experience fits each role, and you can drop the bad matches before anything goes out.

Our relevance scoring is 95% accurate, so the applications that do go out are the ones worth sending.

Ten applications that are clearly you will beat a hundred that look like everyone else.

If you're job searching right now, sign up for SimpleApply.ai for free and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I'll show you how it works.

P.S. I'm working with a select group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you want in.

The weirdest thing about the Netflix layoffs isn’t the number. It’s that the company is growing.

Netflix is reportedly cutting about 6% of its workforce, and this isn’t a company in trouble.

It posted double-digit revenue growth in every region last quarter; it’s on track for close to $3 billion in ad revenue this year, and it’s pushing into live sports and gaming. It added around 2,000 people just last year.

I still have a hard time making sense of it.

Growth used to be the thing that protected your job. Now a company can be expanding into new businesses and still decide that some of the people who got it there aren’t part of the next chapter.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a layoff, so I know how it lands. You did your job, the company did well, and you still got the email.

The lesson isn’t to panic. It’s that job security doesn’t come from how well your company is doing anymore.

It comes from how ready you are to move if you have to, which means a pipeline that’s always warm, a network you talk to before you need it, and skills that keep up with where the work is going.

If you’ve been impacted recently, or you’re employed and want a backup plan without giving up your evenings to manual applications, upload your resume to SimpleApply.ai.

It pulls fresh roles from company career pages and applies only where you’re a strong match. Spend the time you save on what actually moves you forward: talking to people, building connections, and sharpening your skills.

Sign up for free and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I’ll show you how it works.

HubSpot just laid off nearly 660 people, and they did more for them than most companies ever do.

People are getting at least 20 weeks of base pay, six months of outplacement support, and their laptops and home office setups to keep.

The founder also took the time to publicly thank them for helping build the company.
That’s not nothing, and it deserves credit.

But it made me think about what layoffs could look like if companies went one step further.

Layoffs don’t happen overnight.

HubSpot’s board signed off on this plan five days before employees were told, and most companies map out who’s affected well before the announcement.

That’s a window, and it usually gets spent on legal reviews and messaging, not on where those people land next.

If a company can plan a layoff in advance, it can plan the landing too. That could mean warm intros to partners and customers who are hiring, a real look at internal roles before anyone is let go, and an alumni network that actually opens doors. Severance buys people time. Connections get them a job.

Until that becomes normal, the search still falls on the person who just lost their badge.

If you’ve been impacted, or you’re looking for interviews but don’t want to apply manually and keep track of every application, upload your resume to SimpleApply.ai.

It pulls fresh roles from company career pages, applies only where you’re a strong match, and keeps every application in one place, so your energy goes into the conversations that get you hired.

Connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I’ll show you how it works.

P.S. I’m working with a select group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you want in.

Last week, someone over 40 told me they’d applied to more than 500 jobs without landing a single interview. They were sure they knew why.

They’d decided it was their age. And I want to be clear, ageism in hiring is real.
I wasn’t going to tell them they were imagining it.

But I asked one question first: how are you applying?

Easy Apply, almost all of it. 500 applications into the most crowded pile there is, where a strong resume can sit under thousands of others and never get a proper look.

So I set them up with SimpleApply.ai and asked them to give it a week before we talked again.

Five days in, they’ve already landed two interviews.

Their age didn’t change in those five days, and neither did their experience. What changed was where their applications were going and whether they were actually a strong fit for the roles.

It’s early, and they’ve still got real work ahead of them. But it’s a reminder worth sharing.

When you’re not getting interviews, it’s easy to settle on the explanation you can’t control.

Before you do, check the one you can fix.

If you don’t want to spend your best hours applying manually, upload your resume to SimpleApply.ai.

It pulls fresh roles from company career pages and applies only where you’re a strong match, so your time goes into networking, talking to people, and preparing for the interviews that follow.

Sign up for free, and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I’ll walk you through how it works.

P.S. I’m partnering with a small group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you’d like to be one of them.

One of our users just landed an interview at OpenAI. Before anyone asks, I want to be clear about who gets the credit for that.


It's the person.

Because he brought the experience, the skills, and the background that made a recruiter stop and take a second look. That part was always theirs.

What SimpleApply.ai did was smaller and a lot more boring.

It took the manual applying off their plate. It pulled the role from the company's own career page, checked it against their resume, and only applied because the match was strong.

That small thing matters more than it sounds.

Plenty of qualified people never get seen. They're too busy filling out forms for roles that were never a fit, and by the time the right one comes through, they've got nothing left to prepare with.

This person got their evenings back, and they spent them on the things that actually decide an interview like this one: getting sharp on the work, talking to people in the field, and walking in ready.

That's the job I want SimpleApply.ai doing. It's not there to replace the candidate. It's there to clear the way so the candidate can do the part only they can do.

If you're job searching right now, sign up for SimpleApply.ai for free and connect with me here on LinkedIn.

Career coaches: 85% of our active users land interviews every month. DM me, and I'll show you how it works.

P.S. I'm working with a select group of qualified coaches to get their clients up to 20 interviews for free. DM me if you want in.